In 2010, after graduating college, Calma joined AmeriCorps as a Public Ally in Los Angeles and started working for Khmer Girls in Action as the Media & Program Coordinator. She completed her 11-month service with AmeriCorps in July 2011. From 2012 to 2014, Calma was a freelance reporter for VoiceWaves, the Long Beach Post, and Salamin Magazine. As a freelancer, she wrote about LGBTQ communities and Southeast Asian refugees for the Long Beach Post. VoiceWaves Long Beach was a project from New American Media, a national ethnic news collaboration. Calma created videos on housing and healthcare for the production. She also helped launch Salamin Magazine, a Filipino-American arts and culture magazine.

Calma moved to New York City in 2014 to attend Colombia Graduate School of Journalism. In New York, she freelanced for national media outlets, including NBC Asian America, Quartz, FiveThirtyEight, WNYC, and others. Calma’s first position as a climate reporter was with The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit news organization that supports emerging journalists. GroundTruth sent her to Paris in 2015 to cover the

adoption of the Paris Agreement, and she’s been hooked on climate reporting ever since.

In 2017, Calma joined the CBS Corporation as a Story Coordinator for Inside Edition. A few months later, she became an Ida B. Wells Fellow with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. In October 2017, Calma left CBS and joined the nonprofit newsroom Grist as an environmental justice reporter. At Grist, Calma reported on communities disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change and the solutions they fight for in response.

Calma joined The Verge in 2019 as a Science Reporter. In 2020, Calma was an Adjunct Lecturer at The City College of New York, where she taught nonfiction climate writing to masters of fine arts students. Since 2021, she has hosted the podcast Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a Vox Media and Audible Originals production. The podcast investigates natural disasters and their impacts on communities. The series takes listeners into six communities across the US that are contending with disaster and asks: what forces determine who stays, who goes, and what we do with what’s left?

In 2023, Calma was promoted to Senior Science Reporter, where she leads The Verge’s environmental and energy coverage as a senior science reporter.

Her story, “Power Shift,” for The Verge, about a New Orleans neighborhood’s fight for clean energy, was chosen for the 2022 edition of HarperCollins’ The Best American Science and Nature Writing.